Mike DeWolfe : The Daily Edition

Monday night, Victoria's oldest TV station will go dark. Chek-TV has been around for 53 years. It played host to decades of Ida Clarkson. Bruce Kirkpatrick's annoying slice-of-life profiles on cutesy stories. Worst of all: Gordie Tupper (or Tucker-- I don't care). Chek-Around was a show Tupper hosted for some time. How would get on that show? Usually, you'd pay. You'd call them and say you had something interesting to say: if your venture was commercial, they'd hand you a rate card. Pay up and you're interesting. This guy was reknowned for doing only one take: the producer or cameraman would ask to do a second shot or one for safety; confident Tupper would refuse. I was having really mixed feelings about the decline and fall of Chek-TV until last week: they had done a smarmy piece about their efforts to keep the station alive. For the last month, Chek-TV has done a lot of coverage of themselves. They broke from the news and went into ads. Gordie was huckster...

We are having a garage sale this weekend! The traditional rigamorole for doing a garage sale is to prep your stuff and then go down to the newspaper (the Times-Colonist). You are supposed to stand in a line-up of advertisers and wait for the first available window. Place your ad and people will come in droves. Hooray! Today, I went to the Classifieds department of the TC. There are two wickets for classifieds-- one was closed. The other one had the only other customer there: an elderly woman showing off pictures of her cats. Eventually, she figured out that I was waiting and she took her cat pictures home. I stepped up. I wanted my ad to simply read the address, what we're selling and the hours. Nope. They gave me three lines to say what I wanted, but they insisted-- INSISTED-- that the ad starts with "Victoria." The "Victoria" ads are all lumped under a sub-heading of "Victoria", so why have line-after-line repeat the same phrase? I said, "That...

Next Big Future has a cool post of the real impact of nuclear weapons. One thing, I took away from this article: the wave to nuclear threat peaked in 1960. I thought the stockpiles grew in the 1970s, but that appears to not be the case . The media hyped my imminent demise so much that my adolescence had a pall cast over it. Maybe this is why the collapse of local media has me thinking, "meh, if you didn't suck, you'd still be in business." After a half century of using fear to glue us to the TV, we're worn out.

This from the Tribune : BOGOTA, Colombia: A nationwide blackout hit Colombia on Thursday, with authorities struggling to determine the cause of the electrical grid's collapse. President Alvaro Uribe told journalists in the southern city of Cali that authorities would "know in a few minutes" the cause of the blackout, which took place approximately at 10:15 a.m. local time (1515 GMT). He said the blackout "appears to have affected the entire country." Luis Alarcon, manager of state-controlled electricity distributor ISA, told Caracol Radio that the power outage appears to have begun with an undetermined technical glitch at a substation in Bogota and quickly spread to the rest of the country. He said work crews had re-established power to about 20 percent of the country and hoped to reconnect the capital Bogota and other cities in a few hours. So an entire nation drops back to pre-1850 levels in a heartbeat. No one in the North American/Northen media thin...

I have been watching two levels of auto-pilot, two smart guys and one dumb guerilla marketing expert. Yesterday, Boston ground to a halt. Alert teams sprung into action. They destroyed flashing devices that were installed under bridges and in plain view. A menacing LED icon on a box. Wouldbe terrorists, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were arrested and released today on $2500 bail. Their lawyers advised them not to talk about the affair. Of course a hungry media wouldn't have any of that. The perched a podium bristling with microphones on the steps of the court house. The sober pair of Berdovsky and Stevens stepped up and attacked their assailants-- the media. Their lawyer told them not to talk about the case. So, they began gibbering about hair styles. Media-- so hungry to get a scoop-- listened on and broadcast a live ramble about Afros vs. Mohawks. Media loves the War on Terror. It's a feeding frenzy without end. Terorists could strike right now with new weapons and withou...